Tweaks to speed up your Surface Windows 8 RT tablet

Earlier today I had some time to search through the internet for ways to speed up my Surface tablet, or at least the Windows RT operating system that’s running on it.
When I tweeted that I had implemented a few tweaks that made it blazing fast, both on Facebook, Twitter and in my email box replies came in asking me to share/blog them.
So, here we are… and naturally I don’t take any responsibilities for these configuration changes braking your system. Your device is your responsibility, not mine… I’m just sharing my experiences 🙂

Disbable the rotation of the screen

Although this can be a very useful feature, I’ve found it to become very annoying after working with my Surface for about a month now. This feature basically rotates your screen when you hold your tablet in a 90 degrees angle… but it also rotates sooner than that! Hence my annoyance 😉
You can disable it by following these simple steps:
1) Open the Charms menu.
2) Tap on Settings.
3) Tap on the screen icon at the bottom right.
4) You’ll see the rotation lock icon just above the brightness bar. Tap it to toggle the feature on and off.

Speed up web browsing through blocking advertisements

The number one delay in loading web pages these days are advertisements… they are all over the place! So Internet Exlorer comes with a handy little feature that allows you to blog (most) of them 🙂
You can configure it by following these steps:
1) Open the Desktop Internet Explorer.
2) Goto Internet Options (that wheel icon thingy in the above right corner).
3) Goto the Programs tab.
4) Tab on Manage Add-Ons.
5) Tab on Tracking Protection.
6) Add the blockers you desire from the list.
I’ve added the following: Abine, EasyList, EasyPrivacy, Stop Google Tracking.

Disable bluetooth and/or WiFi

This can be a huge battery saver. Next to that, I have a ferm believe that if you don’t need or use something, disable it.
You can disable Bluetooth and/or WiFi with these steps:
1) Open the Charms menu.
2) Tab Settings.
3) Tab Change PC Settings.
4) Tab Wireless.
5) Disable Bluetooth and/or WiFi.

Open weblinks in Desktop Internet Explorer by default

If you’re like me and you prefer to use the Desktop Internet Explorer instead of that other version you get in the Modern interface, you’ll may want to open all weblinks by default in the Desktop Internet Explorer…right?

You can accomplish this by following these steps:
1) Open the Desktop Internet Explorer.
2) Goto Internet Options (that wheel icon thingy in the above right corner).
3) Goto the Programs tab.
4) Change the ‘Choose how you open links’ setting to ‘Always in Internet Explorer on the desktop’.<optional> 5) Check the ‘Open Internet Explorer tiles on the desktop’ checkbox.

Increase the responsiveness of the touch screen

With two little registry tweaks you can increase the responsiveness of the touch screen just enough to make enough of an improvement for you to notice and make the experience just a little bit more fluent.
Accomplish this through these steps:
1) Open regedit.exe
2) Goto HKLM\Software\Microsoft\TouchPrediction
3) Change the values of both ‘Latency’ and ‘SampleTime’ from 8 to 2.

Disable the GUI boot

Booting while showing some fancy animations cost system resources.
When disabling this, it may decrease the boot time of your device by at least 10%!!
Accomplish this with these steps:
1) Open msconfig.exe
2) Enable ‘No GUI boot’

Disable logging

When you want to troubleshoot issues, you may want to enable these settings again. But if you don’t need them, it can give you a huge performance boost if you disable them with the following steps:
1) Open gpedit.msc
2) Goto: User Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Windows Error Reporting
3) Enable the following settings: ‘Disable Logging’ and ‘Disable Windows Error Reporting’.

Reduce the scrolling friction

It’s a graphical feature that can give you a feeling of delay, especially when you’re scrolling down a 400+ page ebook to page 320 or something. So, here’s how to reduce the scrolling friction and making your scroll experience more fluent:
1) Open regedit.exe
2) Goto HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Wisp\Touch
2) Change the value of ‘Friction’ from 32 to whatevery you desire where a lower number means lesser friction.
Note: At first I had this setting configured at ‘0’ but found out that this wasn’t a setting I liked, so I changed it to 12 which is still less than half of the default (32).
Now that we’ve done some tweaking on the laptop’s overall performance, Internet Explorer will be next.
This because on a tablet I spend most of my time in THAT application.

Every time you open Internet Explorer, it will go to the homepage. But do you really need to go to your homepage that much?
If not, configure no homepage by following these steps:
1) Open the Desktop Internet Explorer.
2) Goto Internet Options (that wheel icon thingy in the above right corner).
3) Tab Internet Options
4) Goto the General tab.
5) Set the homepage to ‘default:blank’.

Disable all accelerators

Although the name may be desceptive, these so called accelerators only accelerate one specific thing: The application they belong to.
However, for Internet Explorer itself they do the opposite.
So, to disable accelerators:
1) Open the Desktop Internet Explorer.
2) Goto Internet Options (that wheel icon thingy in the above right corner).
3) Tab Manage add-ons.
4) Tab Accelerators
5) Disable all accelerators you want to disable.

Note that for just about all of these settings to take effect, a reboot is required!